how a.i. recruiters are shaping the future of hiring v2€¦ · presenting the qualiﬁed...

How A.I.Recruitersare Shapingthe Futureof Hiring

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

How A.I. Recruiters are Shaping the Future of Hiring i

What is Recruiting? 2

3

5

10

Why is Recruitment Broken?

How Can AI Help Recruiters?

How Can AI Help Candidates?

12The Future of Recruitment

Sounds like a silly question, doesn’t it? However, when you spend a long time involved in an industry, it can become hard to see the wood for the trees. Often, we need to take a step back. All innovation begins with a bird’s eye view.

Recruitment is the process of connecting people with job vacancies. That’s it in a nutshell. Companies need work done. Out there in the world are people who are able and willing to do that work. For a variety of reasons, it can be difficult for these parties to locate one another. The whole role of recruitment is to act as a skilled middleman and matchmaker.

Concepts like automation and artificial intelligence and futurism can sound highfalutin, and unconnected to the real world. But no matter how advanced the new recruitment technologies might become, they will always be working with these two basic ingredients: organizational need, and human capability. It could be a decades-long career, or gig and project work. But at bottom, recruitment will always be about sourcing and screening candidates for a specific position or job. And these candidates will always fall into two broad categories: active (they come to you) and passive (you go and find them yourself).

Sounds simple, right? And it is. Except for where it isn’t. Modern recruitment is stuck in a rut, and we need AI to help get it out.

What is Recruiting?

How A.I. Recruiters are Shaping the Future of Hiring 2

A recent ManpowerGroup Talent Shortage Survey found that, of the 40,000 employers surveyed, almost half are struggling to fill roles. In the US, the number of employers experiencing talent shortages has grown from 32% in 2015 to 46% in 2019. Things are even worse in Japan and Europe.

Why is recruitment struggling to keep up with hiring demands?

Because technology has transformed the world of work, but recruitment hasn’t kept up.

A couple of decades ago, recruitment was a simpler industry. A recruiter posted a job, and a manageable amount of people applied. But not any more. The internet has meant that the friction to apply is almost zero. Where once a candidate had to fill out a form by hand, now they can just hit a couple of buttons on an app. This means there are now huge amounts of applicants for every job. Which means that screening candidates sucks up hours of a recruiter’s day.

On top of this, generally low levels of unemployment mean that around 80% of people are passive job-seekers. They’re open to something, but they’re not desperate. Because passive candidates are often the most talented and appealing, recruiters have to actively go and find them. But this takes time, meaning that sourcing also sucks up hours of a recruiter’s day.

These two key activities – sourcing and screening – absorb a huge amount of recruiters’ time and attention. But in practice, they are actually comprised of a great deal of drudgery, the same actions repeated again and again.

Why is Recruitment Broken?


The talent war is fiercer than ever, but roles aren’t being filled because recruiters are spending far too much time…

Gathering job requirements from the hiring manager.

Setting a bunch of filters on LinkedIn, and hitting search.

Scrolling through people’s work histories to get the required info, and assessing whether they might have the hard and soft skills the hiring manager is looking for.

Tailoring a boilerplate message for each individual.

Juggling a hundred ongoing conversations to try and suss out if a candidate might be the right fit for the role.

Struggling to coordinate a good time to get on the phone.

Presenting the qualified candidates to the hiring manager.

And they’re doing all this as fast as they possibly can, because hiring managers want that open role filled yesterday.

Here’s the thing: There are things that recruiters could be doing that would be genuinely improving the world of recruitment, to the benefit of both organizations and candidates.

But in reality? The average recruiter lacks the time or the bandwidth to do any of this. They are too busy drowning in the neverending top-of-funnel tasks that drive sourcing and screening. They are burning out in record numbers.

AI and machine learning can create a powerful double effect:

One, the top-of-funnel work happens better and faster. Two, recruiters can stop burning out, and focus on the innovative, deep work of recruitment.


Perhaps you’ve heard a rumour that, thanks to artificial intelligence, the world of employment will soon resemble a deleted scene out of Westworld.

There’s no doubt that automation is impacting a range of industries. But away from the scaremongering, the truth is that, in countless areas of life, AI is proving to be enormously helpful to humankind. Tools that leverage machine learning are diagnosing diseases, flying planes, predicting the weather, and much more. In a range of industries and jobs, co-operation between humans and machines is making life faster, smoother and more efficient.

Current AI (and especially machine learning) works most effectively when applied to repeatable, rules-based tasks. It is at its best when taking boring, manual and repetitive tasks off the plates of humans – and performing those tasks rapidly, systematically, and with fewer human constraints. Unlike humans, AIs are blessed with an inherently flawless memory, so as they perform their tasks they learn constantly about what works and what doesn’t. This means that their efficacy increases exponentially the longer they apply themselves to a given assignment.

The gruelling top-of-funnel work that dominates the recruiter’s day is precisely the sort of work that an AI can excel at. Recruiting is ripe for automation.


How can AI Help Recruiters?

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An advanced AI chatbot – like ourown creation, Wendy – can use task automation to radically improve sourcing: that early stage of actually finding candidates that you want to reach out to.

The basic challenge of sourcing is coping with an enormous and hard-to-parse field of candidates. Without AI help, sourcing is a slow and arduous and arduous job. You scour LinkedIn, scan through hundreds of resumes, and copy and paste messages. It takes hours. This can easily mean that you don’t get to do as much sourcing as you’d like, and miss out on some great candidates who just need a bit of encouragement.

When engaging passive candidates, or engaging active candidates that come to you, an AI recruiting partner can use task automation to radically improve screening.

Screening is, ultimately, a targeted form of conversation. But like sourcing, conversations take time. And time is a recruiters’ most precious resource.

Your average recruiter can have fifteen or twenty screening interviews squeezed into a single day. Because the numbers they are dealing with are so high, they have to treat these interactions like a bit of a conveyor belt. Rarely do they get to take their time, be patient, and give the interaction real depth and quality.

But an AI? Through complex and personalised conservational algorithms, an AI recruiting partner can conduct in-depth, role-specific conversations at scale. We’re talking hundreds of screening chats in a single day.

But calibrated correctly, an AI can absorb a job description, and scour the digital realm far more quickly and comprehensively than a human. In seconds, using instant and powerful data recall, an AI can assess hundreds of candidates’ suitability for a given role.

For example, our AI recruiting partner, Wendy, enjoys rapid access to a database of more than 250-million people that she can tap into with multi-channel outreach. She can tap into a vast talent pool, integrated ATS systems, and online talent communities. Programmed correctly, she can conduct this outreach in a way that is highly resistant to the sorts of bias that can blight human-driven sourcing.


More Powerful Sourcing

Radically Improved Screening

An AI recruiting partner will never be in a rush. They can give every single candidatea consistently high-caliber and unbiased conversation. They are never tired, or drained; to them, it’s never 4:30pm ona Friday.

Calibrated correctly, an AI can ask all of the right questions and all of the right follow-ups, and answer many of the queries a candidate might have. They can possess robust domain knowledge of the industry, and access to all relevant facts and figures. All of this cultivates rich, personalized conversations, which increases the qualityof responses from candidates.

Finally, after conducting a powerful screening outreach campaign, an AI recruiting partner can hand off tailored recommendations to the hiring manager.

In short, with help from AI, the whole candidate-engagement process can be optimized. In recruiting, candidate experience is paramount. Candidates need to feel that recruiters are paying them the proper attention, and giving them a fair hearing. Whether you’re screening active applicants or pursuing passive candidates, first impression is particularly important. The initial interaction needs to be rich, personalised, and unhurried.

With some AI assistance, not only do high-quality conversations happen at scale; an AI can also make sure that messages never fall through the cracks, and candidates are always responded to right away. Touchpoints don’t get lost, and all job-hunters feel fully seen and heard. An AI can be reliably pro-active with follow-ups.


One Wade and Wendy Fortune 50 customer had 63 open roles that needed filling and they were struggling to build a pipeline for the roles using traditional recruitment methods. Using her substantial database, Wendy conducted a personalised outreach campaign. In just two weeks, she completed 767 patient, role-specific, personalised chats, ultimately submitting 325 qualified and interested candidates to the open roles. It was determined it would have taken the company 16 dedicated sourcers to achieve Wendy’s pipeline results over that period of time, saving the company $54k during that two-week engagement.

We all know the parts of the job that human recruiters love: finding a candidate they really like, and want to fight for. Spending real time with candidates. Taking a promising candidate for a coffee or lunch, liaising between candidates and hiring managers, working to set up the perfect match. Hearing that a former candidate is slotting in perfectly, or has even got a promotion. Finding time to host or attend events, and nurture great talents. Strategizing about how they can take their entire recruiting approach to the next level.

Once an AI recruiting partner brings task automation to bear on sourcing and screening, the recruiter actually has time for all this. Once the repetitive, top of the funnel tasks are off the recruiter’s plate, they can focus on the creative, innovative side of the job. They are free to focus on the jobs that machines are not able to do: the jobs that require serious strategy, empathy, generalised and multi-disciplinary thinking.

Automating the top of the funnel benefits the entire world of work. With more time on their hands. recruiters can dedicate real time and deep thought to the higher-level, strategic side of the job.

When recruiters can offload mundane responsibilities, they give themselves the chance to explore, develop and optimize all-new KPIs. They can think long and hard about what “quality of hire” actually means. They can properly analyze their decision-making processes, and began to examine data patterns regarding what profiles of people make for a good quality of hire.

With a healthy amount of time for real candidate relationship management, recruiters can get more micro, with a measurement like time-to-onboarding. They can also get more macro, with a broad assessment like lifetime candidate value. They can tailor success measurements to each individual candidate, and each individual industry. Every hiring experience can be customised so that KPIs are no longer conjured with a broad brush, but defined in terms of the specific features of a certain role. The post-hire candidate experience can be examined, rather than ignored as soon as a role is filled.

At a high level, recruiting and HR can start to blend a little more. Right now, people only think of HR in a post-hire context. But it would be far more productive if HR was invested in the whole of the recruiting experience.


Facilitating the Deep Workof Recruitment

Recruiters can bring new KPIs to their interaction with companies, too. They can spend more time understanding their needs in a deep and complex fashion. By doing this, rather than just supplying individuals, recruiters can focus on building teams. They can examine how different attributes and different personality types interact and work together, opening up a whole world of predictive recruiting. Recruiters can get comfier with the intricacies of company compensation structures. They can bear in mind their multi-quarter goals.

New KPIs could also be based around self-assessment. With the help of automation, recruiters can find the time to look at the data and patterns regarding their own performance, and analyse where they can improve. Across the board, they can spend less time on to-do lists, and more time on strategy.


"Wendy is a valuable addition to our recruiting organization. Since onboarding her, we've substantially expanded our reach and found quality candidates we previously wouldn't have had the bandwidth to fully engage. Candidates have been very responsive to her personalized outreach and openly share their stories and relevant experience when chatting with her. With Wendy, we better understand the candidates who move through our recruitment process, and we ultimately make better hires."

— Jason Lorenz, Head of HR Strategy, Technology Operationsat E*TRADE

"As an RPO, we're constantly tackling three challenges: how can we increase the efficiency of our recruiting process? How

can we create the best talent experience possible? And how can we do this at scale for millions of hires? Deploying Wendy

across our portfolio of companies enables our team to engage exponentially more talent in a personalized and scalable way,

while providing deeper insights to our recruiters to make more informed decisions.."

— Jason Roberts, Global Head of Technology and Analyticsat Randstad Sourceright

The new generation of AI recruiting partners are very advanced chatbots.

If you’re a little skeptical about the idea that chatbots can have the powerful impact described here, that’s understandable. Not long ago, chatbots were pretty bad. If you remember the nineties, you remember yelling down a phone line at an automated voice. We’ve all typed things in pop-up chat-boxes and been sent in Kafkaesque loops by the same canned responses.

But chatbots have changed. The advent of advanced machine learning (ML) algorithms has changed everything. According to a Gartner report, by 2020, 85% of all customer interactions will be using chatbots. This is because chatbots are now flexible and smart enough to handle these interactions.

Wendy, for example, leverages Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques and keyword algorithms that are at the very cutting-edge of conversational AI. She is constantly learning about different professional domains and calibrating her understanding of what hiring teams need.

Certain types of human exchange – such as those that generate deep friendship – may well lie forever out of the reach of human-machine interaction. But 99% of the conversations that we have in life aren’t like this. When it comes to the more functional parts of life, what we need is an interlocutor who isn’t in a rush, knows what we want, can answer all our questions, and has excellent informational recall.

Recruitment is a perfect example of an area of life where AI communication is precisely what humans need. In the early stages of the recruitment process, a recruiter and a candidate need to engage in a two-way exchange where each learns about the other. The more effectively and efficiently this conversation is conducted, the better the process.


How can AI Help Candidates?

People sometimes criticize chatbots for hosting conversations that are robotic, stilted and rushed. But the truth is, in the world of recruitment, this is often how human-to-human conversations can feel. This isn’t anyone’s fault; people are busy, there are only so many hours in the day. Recruiters have to conduct multiple introductory calls with many prospective candidates, so they have to move through smalltalk and a set of narrow questions.They have to move fast. But his means the conversation easily becomes hasty and robotic.

Every recruiter wants to do the best job that they can, but they are under pressure to deliver, and don’t have all day. Their domain knowledge is limited to their industry of expertise. They can forget to mention important facts about the company, or neglect to ask the right questions. There are real-world constraints to hosting a long and patient chat in the middle of the night when you’ve been working all day.


In the realm of recruitment, what is required is a productive and thorough information exchange, in which both parties feel that they are being given the other’s full attention. In short, advanced chatbots can achieve this better than an overworked human can. An intelligence like Wendy is precisely what is needed.

Candidates want to be given time, they want to be treated with respect, and they want to be able to ask all their questions. They want to talk to someone who possesses full knowledge of their background and their target industry. An AI recruiter fulfils these desires. And it is inherently unbiased, concise, and never gets distracted. It can conduct rich, personalized conversations at a time of day that is convenient to candidates.

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Recruitment is broken because the industry has been hit by the effects of technological disruption but failed to harness the power of that technological disruption.

The future of recruitment is one in which humans stop trying to do this job by putting in hours of repetitive labour. The future of recruitment is one in which, instead, humans let the incredible innovations of AI help them.

Robots aren’t here to intrude on the modes of communication that are uniquely and irreplaceably human. They aren’t here to replace us. But in those parts of life where we need a routine, monotonous, information-heavy exchange, they can help us flourish. They can take some of the communicative legwork off of our plate, so we can focus on the more expansive and more creative sorts of conversation. Recruitment is crying out for this shift.

Wendy is part of a new frontier of technology that is being developed specifically to work side-by-side with humans to help recruiters do their jobs even better, and candidates get a richer experience. Recruiters under pressure from hiring managers can do their jobs better, while prospective employees get to enjoy personalized conversations that help them further their career. Everyone wins.

Recruiters are drowning in active candidates that need screening, and struggling to make time for passive candidates that need sourcing. The top-of-funnel drudgery is preventing them from innovating in their careers.

Meanwhile, candidates often feel that their experience of job-hunting is hurried and shallow, and that they don’t get the attention or room to express themselves that they’d like.

Remember the basics: Recruitment is about connecting people with job vacancies. That’s it. This boils down to recruiters finding candidates, and then establishing their suitability for a role with patience, focus and depth.

The Future of Recruitment


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